Boosted by Locarno-awarded debut Instinct, Dutch actor-director Halina Reijn fit nicely in the A24 canon with her satirical thriller Bodies Bodies Bodies. Yet the latter elicited rather lukewarm critical responses and it almost seemed Reijn might have been a one-hit European wonder fallen prey to the American dream. Then came Babygirl. As one of the first competition titles to grace the Lido, it promises a lot: not only does its title roll off the tongue with a delightful ring, it leaves one feeling a bit giddy (and a little naughty) for having uttered it aloud. Let’s not forget this is a film about a tech CEO / star mom / perfect wife (played by none other than ice queen Nicole Kidman) submitting to a much-younger intern (Harris Dickinson) to the point of literally eating from his hand.
It’s not too early in the festival to say Reijn wrote and directed one of––if not the––most compelling films of this year’s Venice selection and deserves full praise for landing a project of this caliber while making a third feature that is as close to perfection as can be. Babygirl is billed as an erotic thriller and doesn’t waste any precious time before stating it; the very opening scene sees Romy (Kidman) climaxing, her face held in a tight close-up until she collapses on her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas). After exchanging “I love you”-s with him, she slips out of bed and furiously masturbates to some DDLG (Daddy Dom Little Girl) porn until orgasming, this time for real. With this compact, assertive opening, Babygirl already hints that Romy’s desires lie in a place where the rules of control and comfort are different: subspace.
Well, subspace is not exactly spatial, but the term is used within the kink community to denote a particular state of mind and bodily sensitivity a person enters in the receiving end of a dominant-submissive sexual dynamic. Subspace is a place as much as it is demarcated by limits and held together by a continuous exchange of consent between the dominant and submissive party. All this Babygirl knows very well. The bar for erotic BDSM thrillers is notoriously low (9½ Weeks and Fifty Shades of Grey have betrayed kink again and again) even with certain exceptions (the stellar Bound, Jane Campion’s In the Cut)––simply knowing your stuff doesn’t get you far. Where Reijn shines is how she handles genre and narrative tropes (affairs, company politics, age gap to name a few) with playful ease while creating a world where a woman’s self-discovery and desire can be strongly ambivalent with neither punishment nor compromise to tie things up in the end.
Plot-wise, Babygirl keeps it deceitfully simple: Romy is dominant (an all-powerful CEO) in the streets and a submissive (likes being told what to do) in the sheets. A theater director by profession, her husband Jacob is rehearsing a staging of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, where the title character feels trapped in her marriage and house, neither of which she truly wants. “It’s not about desire! It’s about suicide!,” we hear him exclaim at one point, summarizing the stark separation of his and his wife’s interior worlds so well that he must not be even aware of it.
Romy’s awakening comes in the face of the young intern Samuel (Dickinson) whose aloofness is only matched by his silent stare and piercing remarks that jolt Romy out of her usual composure. He’s brazen but never vulgar; she’s unfazed, also curious. Every time they are in the same room together, it’s like the frame itself twitches with desire, their faces and hands in close-ups captured with neurotic handheld motions that jump as fast as the electrical current between them. Cinematographer Jasper Wolf captures something ineffable: there is the chemistry, of course, but most of all it’s the endless supply of yearning and appetite Kidman infuses into Romy. In a way, that electrifying feeling of watching Samuel and her share an intimate scene––regardless if it’s explicit or not, it is always sexual––taps into an essential feature of BDSM dynamics: the split responsibility of control and the deep care it necessitates for one another.
This said, Babygirl is far from an idealistic film; it’s very honest about the flaws and drawbacks in the process of discovering one’s kink. Communicating––finding the language within you and out in the world to fit desires you may have had your entire life––is a messy journey and sharing Romy’s feels as further removed from Bodies Bodies Bodies’ satirical tone as possible. Reijn is serious about this film and its characters, even when they are not serious about the issues themselves. Samuel lashes out, Jacob’s initial response to his wife’s preferences involves consulting the Bible, and Romy herself is quick to “blame” it all on her childhood. But none of these reactions are final or condemning. There is wit, some stinging humor, and a lot of arousal baked into Babygirl, but it all works so well as an exciting, sexy (yes, let’s reclaim this word!) whole because the film pays attention to sex. The mood, the boundaries, the mistakes, the ecstasy of it all feed into its melodramatic streaks. Most of all, Halina Reijn has inaugurated a new era of the erotic movie.
Babygirl premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will be released by A24 on December 25.